Posts tagged: Obama

The Obama administration announced on Tuesday that it would delay for a year, until 2015, the Affordable Care Act mandate that employers provide coverage for their workers or pay penalties, responding to business complaints and postponing the effective date beyond next year’s midterm elections.

Update:
I had not been to Drudge when I linked to The New York Times above. I’ll save you the trip:

Okay, you’re going to have to help me. What exactly are “tough spending cuts on things we don’t need“? That’s your president speaking during a visit to an auto plant in Redford, Michigan, mind you. Here’s the quote in context:

What you need is a package that keeps taxes where they are for middle-class families, we make some tough spending cuts on things that we don’t need, and then we ask the wealthiest Americans to pay a slightly higher tax rate, and that’s a principle I won’t compromise on.

If we don’t need something, it’s not hard to get rid of it, right? Unless you’re a hoarder. President Obama’s not a hoarder is he?

That’s why some in the Muslim world were chanting the same thing back in May:

That’s why protests are happening all over the world and appear so coordinated. No, this is all because of a YouTube video. Yeah, right.

Maybe the protestors are tired of Team Obama spiking the ball. You can almost hear the jihadists thinking, “Okay, you got our guy. Enough already!”

On second thought, it’s probably Romney’s fault.

UPDATE: Regarding that movie. I haven’t seen it, but I’ll grant that it’s offensive and some in the streets of Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere are greatly offended by it. Still, I have sincere doubts that we can attribute all these protests and protestors to that movie.

This is a good time for a disclaimer-Some people might call me right of the right wing when it comes to personal views and voting. When it comes to trading, politics absolutely need[s] to be put aside. I take a pragmatic view of things and never confuse politics with policy.

Which, in turn, reminded me of one of my posts that had the following poll result:

Which brings me back to the claims in the first post I referred to: “When it comes to trading, politics absolutely needs to be put aside.” I get TheMacroTrader’s point: when creating policy, we need to operate from facts. But remove all politics from the equation? I’m not so sure about that proposition. Remove all politics, and any sane person would vote for Romney, based on the poll result I posted above. But the fact is that all kinds of considerations enter into virtually all of our decisions. In the case of Romney, many won’t vote for him because of his stand on abortion, but they’d be happy to have him managing their financial affairs. Likewise, facts can only tell us so much about oil: that we’ve probably passed peak oil; that many reasons other than Obama account for the recent rise in the price of gas; etc. But then there’s this in that TheMacroTrader.com post:

T Boone Pickens is not lying when he says that every President since Nixon has declared that we will be energy independent and then has proceeded to do nothing.

Is this time different? Will one of the candidates–including our current President–step up and do something? And so we’re back to politics.

In October last year, Obama granted McDonald’s and 28 other firms waivers from having to comply with his Affordable Care Act. With that in mind, consider the following.

Prior to the release of the May jobs report, Morgan Stanley, according to MarketWatch, estimated that McDonald’s would account for roughly half the jobs created in May 2011.

Morgan Stanley estimates McDonald’s hiring will boost the overall number by 25,000 to 30,000. The Labor Department won’t detail an exact McDonald’s figure — they won’t identify any company they survey — but there will be data in the report to give a rough estimate.

In fact, total private-sector employment grew by 83,000 in May. Thus IF Morgan Stanley was right, Mickey D’s was responsible for as much as 36% of the private sector jobs created last week. (If you use the total non-farm payroll, which includes government jobs, job growth was even weaker at just 54,000; thus, Mickey D’s could have accounted for up to 55% of new jobs.)

In any case, job growth was weak in May, and McDonald’s probably created a large number of those jobs; thus, logic compels the following question: Should Obama grant waivers to all businesses?

Walter Russell Mead says it was Palestine and that all the bruhah about his Israel/Middle East speech is overblown or downright wrong. I agree. He writes:

On substantive grounds, it is hard to see what Obama’s critics have in mind. The US position is and has always been that the 1967 borders are the starting point for negotiations. UN Security Council Resolution 242, the basis for all negotiations on this question since it was passed in 1967, makes that very plain — although that resolution does not demand an Israeli withdrawal from all of the territory it conquered in the war. President Bush never deviated from this position; neither has President Obama. Israeli prime ministers including Likud prime ministers like Ehud Olmert have accepted this for years. This is standard diplospeak boilerplate. It is a non-statement, a platitude, even a bromide.

His post comes with a nifty little map of the controversy, courtesy of the CIA: